One week before the presidential election on November 5 in the United States, polls show a narrow margin between Democrats and Republicans. The battle is particularly close in Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where polls show a tie.
In Nevada, Trump has a lead of 0.21 points and in Pennsylvania by 0.3. In Wisconsin and Michigan, Harris leads by 0.11 and 0.38, respectively. Pennsylvania has the greatest weight among the four as it distributes 19 electoral votes
The margin is so close that there could even be the paradox of Kamala Harris winning the popular vote and losing the election if Donald Trump wins in key states that give him a majority in the Electoral College. According to the latest polls, the Republican has narrowed his lead over Harris and is already leading polls in five of the seven key states to win the White House.
The electoral college is made up of 538 delegates. To win, one of the candidates must receive at least 270 votes from the electoral college.
Delegates are distributed by state and the winning party in each territory wins the entire number of delegates allocated to that state, except in Maine (4) and Nebraska (5), where the system is proportional. With these two exceptions, it doesn’t matter whether you win a state by one vote or by a million: if you win, you win all the electoral votes in that state, and the loser in that state gets nothing.
The polls currently present a very tense scenario, with a slight advantage for Kamala Harris. In the following chart you can see how they are based on the average of surveys published by FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates different surveys and gives a different weight by date, sample size, methodology, transparency or bias of each polling station.
Harris leads the popular vote by 1.5 points over Trump. Harris has been rising in the polls since taking on the presidential race in terms of who is still president, although the gap has narrowed significantly in the past week. Today, they are only 1.4 points apart whereas a few weeks ago, they were up to 3 points apart.
In the key states, Donald Trump is a little further behind in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina with a lead of 1.85, 1.53 and 1.32 points respectively. Harris is leading in polls in Michigan and Wisconsin, the key Rust Belt states that gave Trump the presidency in 2016, but she doesn’t have even a half-point lead.
Precisely in Arizona, the Republican managed to reverse the polls and is ahead of Harris. In 2020, Joe Biden won this state with 49.4% of the vote and a margin of about 10,000 votes behind Trump.
The following map presents the victory forecasts for each candidate, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, which takes into account not only the polls but also the voting history, economic and social data of each state to simulate the victory probabilities of each candidate .
According to this model, victory in the 2024 elections will be decided in the seven key states. Currently, the model gives an undecided result in four of them and very close in favor of Trump in the other three.
Among the most contested states, the Democratic candidate would need to win Nevada and Wisconsin, in addition to Michigan, to reach the electoral majority of 270 electoral votes.
The following table provides a summary of how the race is shaping up in the polls for the seven tightest states that will decide the 2024 U.S. elections.
Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina are three swing states. It’s possible that Harris could win the White House without them, although that would be a very difficult scenario. For Trump, Georgia and North Carolina are more critical. For now, Pennsylvania continues to be considered the place that will have the last word and in this state, Trump has just succeeded, very narrowly, in overturning the polls.
